“We’ve tried baseball and given it our best shot,” said Mets General Manager Omar Minaya. “For fifty years we’ve been trying to fill in for the Dodgers and the Giants and it just isn’t working anymore. Sure we’ve had our high points, but these days baseball is all about buying Japanese-Cuban players nurtured from birth on huge amounts of steroids and then paying them two hundred billion dollars on a ten year contract only to have them call in with a knee injury. And the Mets just can’t compete.

The Mets however are not giving up. The current plan is to take the Mets roster, made up of boat people on steroids and Daryl Strawberry, and explore sucking at other sports, including Mets ice hockey, Mets football, Mets urban soccer and Mets curling.

“We don’t know what the future will bring for us,” Minaya said, “oh wait we do, certain failure and defeat. But by switching sports unexpectedly we can keep the fans interested and unaware that we’re doomed to suck at anything we do that involves a ball of any kind. But until Queens sinks into the ocean, we’re still going to have loyal and completely clueless fans.”

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While your built in anti-virus program may keep on waiting for updates before taking any action against a new and cutting edge infection, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE doesn’t have to wait. Even before the virus or malware has been officially identified and labeled, a process that can take days during which your system can be badly compromised and damaged, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE is already on the case thanks to VIPRE’s Active Protection™ and its Genscan™ and Cobra™ heuristics which can find malware by pattern, without having to wait for an official identification and update. And MX-Virtualization™ can watch how malware behaves without damaging your system. But you don’t need a cutting edge system to enjoy the benefit of this level of protection, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE works even on older systems and netbooks to give you next generation anti-virus and anti-spyware protection even if you don’t have a next generation system.

The bad guys have gone on to the next generation of trojans and rootkits, it’s time for your security solution to step up to the next generation of protection too.

But it doesn’t end there. Stargate Universe mixes that up with some of the look and plot of Battlestar Galactica, and pads that out with a cast that owes something to Lost by way of the CW, including Eli, a Seth Rogen lookalike who gets on board by solving a puzzle in an MMORPG that looks a lot like Mass Effect, talk about pandering to your SciFi channel audience, a Senator’s daughter who spends half an episode naked in the shower, and a soldier who hallucinates in Catholic symbolism, crossing Supernatural with Battlestar Galactica for pretentiousness fail.

The thing is that underneath all those layers, the show isn’t bad. It’s just uneventful. The cast works reasonably well and so does the premise. But with no aliens in sight, there’s nothing of interest except ship malfunctions. Air was a fairly decent follow up to a reasonably strong pilot, but even so it doesn’t really capture your attention. Darkness was so boring that the producers felt the need to throw in gobs of eye candy to try and keep viewers from switching the channel. And basing a show around crazy people yelling at each other only works if you manage to convince a bunch of the alpha dorks and the IO9 crowd that you’re selling brilliant drama, ala the Battlestar Galactica reboot, something that Stargate Universe doesn’t have a shot in hell of pulling off. That means Stargate Universe needs an enemy fast to survive.

For example you might have bought yourself the latest generation iPhone, letting you browse the net on the go, call, play games and do a thousand other things, but your new mobile swiss army knife won’t be at its snazziest without the right iphone case that will protect your phone from the elements and from your own clumsiness, that will say you’ve got physical style as well as digital substance. And at www.mobilefun.co.uk, you will have no trouble finding a wide variety of iPhone cases, one of which is sure to catch your eye and hook your purse strings. And of course an iPhone is no good without power, keeping your mobile lifestyle bright and with lots of bars, requires an iphone car charger and wouldn’t you know it, but www.mobilefun.co.uk has them too.

But www.mobilefun.co.uk has much more than just iPhone accessories, they’ve got mobiles from Nokia, Samsung and Sony. And then there are accessories from just about every manufacturer under the sun, so whether your flavor of Mobile is HTC or Blackberry, or anything in between, whether your digital yen runs to games to keep you amused to ringtones to express your aural image to SIM cards and replacement parts, let www.mobilefun.co.uk be the mechanics of your mobile lifestyle.

But in the middle of the process, Noah Barakh tries to have an affair with a powerful politician’s wife which ends in her murder and his suicide. Both of them are reborn in the Accord itself, only the version of Priscilla reborn in the Accord is one whose scan predates their love affair, resulting in Barakh going to greater extremes to try and recreate their relationship, while being pursued by her husband, Jack Burnham, a very determined and sociopathic politician. All of this sounds a bit soap operatish and it is, but Brooke’s writing manages to make it work.

The problem is that The Accord, like a lot of larger novels, is about 200 pages too long. And when Brooke runs out of ideas, he turns the formerly realistic nuts and bolts Accord into the Matrix. Yes, literally the Matrix. Jack Burnham takes on parts of the memories of others, and gains the power to turn into anyone in the Matrix he wants, basically turning him into Agent Smith. He seemingly kills Noah, but Noah returns to be worshiped by everyone in the Accord as a godlike figure. And by the time he grows wings and begins to fly around, The Accord hasn’t just gone off the rails, but off the cliff into the worst VR cliches you can think of. And it doesn’t help that Keith Brooke tries to pad out the space by tying in one of his stories as an ending chapter. What follows next makes no sense, and after a few thousand years in which Jack+ has gone around molesting half the girls in the universe and turned earth into a backward stone age planet constantly at war… ending the novel by having Barakh and Priscilla kiss and say the equivalent of, “Awww I loved you too”, just doesn’t fly.

Now do you see Google rolling out a big billboard campaign telling people to Google or go to YouTube or how convenient Gmail is? No, and that’s exactly the point. Print ads are not really a great way to drive internet traffic. Old media advertising is non-interactive for one thing. Obviously Yahoo is trying to redefine perception of its brand, or something. But Yahoo doesn’t have a brand perception problem. More people use Yahoo’s services anyway, and if anything the contrast tinkering with Yahoo Mail is more likely to drive users away than attract them.

Yahoo does not have a problem getting users. It has a problem making the whole thing pay. And running an AOL-like campaign aimed at the common man is fundamentally stupid. It’s Yahoo trying to piggyback on Microsoft’s antics, but Microsoft is mostly trying to sell physical products, Yahoo is trying to sell people on the Yahoo experience, or something like that, but idiots grinning with joy at being able to open their email or use Flickr to upload their dog’s pictures to the world, is not it. Neither is Jewel fronting a yodeling contest, whatever the hell’s that about. When you provide services, you get users. It’s a pretty simple formula, and not one that old media billboards can change a lot.

Worry has also been spreading through the transparent cubicles of Apple Electronics Inc Etc, as Apple’s top notch marketing department and font specialists try to figure out how to fight back and watch an entire season pass of Flight of the Conchords at the same time. “We’re completely okay with black people,” said Apple’s director of communications, Bryn Mawr grad Holly Whistleton. “And here at Apple we think they have their place, dancing around while wearing iPods. But when it comes to using Macs, that’s something it takes a sexually ambiguous twenty something Harvard dropout to do properly.”

Steve Jobs however is back at work and on the problem. While Apple has categorically refused to actual black people in the ads, a crack team of Apple’s top researchers buzzed on smart drinks is hard at work developing an alternative to black people. “We at Apple refuse to go along with the old concept of black people. We refuse to be satisfied with that,” Steve Jobs reportedly said. “We want to develop Apple’s vision of what black people should be. Shinier, with Apple logos stamped on them and much more useful.” As his first move, Jobs put in a call to the KKK, whose shiny white uniforms match the Apple offices and product line so much better.